Preserving our digital history: Photoshop 1.0.1 source code released to the public

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Photoshop is a surprisingly important part of our lives. It’s used as a tool in countless industries, and it has even become part of common vernacular as a verb meaning “to edit a photo.” Without a doubt, Photoshop is a culturally significant piece of software, and it deserves to be preserved for posterity. Thanks to Adobe and the Computer History Museum, the source code of Photoshop version 1.0.1 for Mac is now available for non-commercial use.

This isn’t the first time the source of aging commercial software has been released to the public. Id Software, maker of games like Doom and Quake, have shared much of its engine source code to the public. For example, Doom 3‘s engine is available right on GitHub, and licensed under the GPL. The source to the original SimCity was released under the GPL as well. Releasing code makes a lot of sense for older games. There is a limited market for selling aging games, and the developer can benefit from the increased exposure and good will from the community.

The drive to preserve aging games is clearly strong, and the emulation and ROM archiving community is quite active. Old tools like word processors or photo editors don’t quite have the same emotional attachment, so the number of people dedicated to saving old software is smaller. Releasing the source code for old applications is a good step towards keeping software running on new platforms, though. Now that we have the Photoshop source code, we can expect working versions of it to exist for decades to come. In fifty years, our grandkids will want to know what early computer software was like. Unless more companies take steps like this to preserve software in a working state, a huge portion of our culture will fade into obscurity.

This release has all of the Photoshop code, but it doesn’t include the MacApp library licensed from Apple, so some additional work is needed to get it into a fully functional state. Contained in roughly 128,000 lines, the download is a mere 601KB zipped. Expanded, it’s about 2.7MB. It’s estimated that three-fourths of the code is written in Pascal while 15% of it is written in 68000 assembler language. As for the remaining 10%, that’s taken up by miscellaneous data. The code is uncommented, but at least the devs had the decency to keep it formatted cleanly.

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